THE WORD : Cries and Whispers

Gerry Pass believes in the beauty of words spoken truthfully about that which is far from beautiful. “The AIDS Poetry Project,” Pass’ anthology-in-progress, is a vehicle for the anger, sorrow and frustration of people affected by AIDS--both the dying and those who can but stand and wait.

The project’s shellshocked world is filled with the voices of mothers, brothers, fathers, sisters, friends, all watching a loved one’s life collapse. From AIDS patients themselves, sorrow and, sometimes, anger:

“My lovers live in me now/if you can call this living./Who can defeat an army of the dead?/They only want/they only want/their revenge,” writes Rondo Mieczkowski in “The AIDS Dance.”

“For me, poetry is the one avenue available which helps me deal with strong feelings, and I thought I couldn’t possibly be the only one,” explains Pass, 30, a poet who has lost many of his friends to AIDS.

So the Beverly Hills resident sent 500 flyers to libraries, AIDS specialists, AIDS organizations and poetry magazines. So far, he’s received more than 1,200 submissions from all over the world, but he’s still looking for a publisher.

“A thousand years from now, when this is over,” says Pass, a legal assistant at a law office, “people will see that there was an epidemic, and that there was a big problem with facing it--people ignored it, people had to hide and people couldn’t cry because of the toxic stigma attached to this disease. If all the book does is document this as a piece of art, it will have done its duty.”